Your Daily Pope

There was a bit of an odd moment yesterday when my man Chuck Todd was sitting in for Mrs. Greenspan on Mrs. Greenspan's Happy Fun Hour. Chuck was talking to Ann Thompson, who is covering the activities of the Clan Of The Red Beanie as it attempts to fill the Chair Of Peter with someone who is at least a longshot to be facing a grand jury any time in the next five years. My man Chuck asked Thompson about a Mass she'd attended that apparently was celebrated by Dolan of New York for the various Papists in the press corps over there. Remarkably, my man Chuck failed to inquire about the propriety of a Prince Of The Church using the Eucharist for spin control, Dolan of the New York being approximately as apolitical at this point as Mark Hanna was. (It was Dolan who has been the point-cleric of the phony "religious liberty" campaign against allowing Presbyterian charwomen in the employ of Catholics to have their ladyparts medicine covered by their health insurance.) To me, this struck me as very weird, and damned close to simony. Of course, once you've used a burial fund as a Cayman Islands account to stash money that might have been vulnerable to some of those pesky child-abuse lawsuits, the way Dolan of New York did when he was Dolan of Milwaukee, milking the liturgy for some good press is only a venial sin. Still, it's not like there aren't other, non-aligned places to go to Mass in Rome of a Sunday. The journalists there should have told Dolan to go whistle.

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It is important to keep an eye on what the ultramontane are about as the Clan prepares to hoodwink the Holy Spirit. They have their favorites. One of them is this cat, Raymond Cardinal Burke, a mere lad from Richland Center in Wisconsin and now an important Curial bureaucrat and, frankly, an outright loon, as well as a walking argument for the elimination of the Church's tax-exempt status. He's worried about the banjo Mass, but he wants Latin back. (So, frankly, as an option, do I.) He's soft on the reintegration into the Church of the Lefebvrist cultists, but death on politicians who displease him. He also has shown a remarkable ability to miss the point on what to do with the elephant there, doing tricks in the sacristy. And it was his job not to miss that point.

To start with let's note here the obvious: preying sexually on children violates much more than canon law. More fundamentally it violates God's laws and every notion of decent human conduct in cultures throughout the world. As one NCR commentator recently wrote: It violates "the laws of the heart and soul, laws of human love, consensual adult expressions of that love, secular laws, criminal laws, and every other law—even if canon law never existed." Now, to the next level. What the cardinal fails to mention in his assessment of the scandal is that from the very beginning it has been a two-step violation against the Catholic family. The first has been the abusive acts by the priest; the second has been a consistent pattern of episcopal denial and cover-up. This second violation has been especially troubling, as it has revealed a generation of episcopal leaders more concerned about institutional image than gospel witness.

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Yeah, but John Kerry was a threat to the Church.

However, Burke is completely beloved by the George Weigel-KLo-First Things wing of the American church. You will note that all the things that we mention above, including the mushiness on French heretics, are cited by Dr. Marshall as a reason for the Clan to vote this jamoke into the papacy. He is also, of course, a humble man of God.

The 63-year-old prelate — in his workaday attire of black cassock with red piping and a scarlet sash with matching skullcap — was speaking in his gilded offices on the upper floors of the 16th century Palazzo della Cancelleria, one of the most famous Renaissance palaces in Rome that now houses the Catholic Church's highest court.

I always thought I missed a little, not having been around for the Medicis.Jesus, on the other hand, would never stop throwing things.

While pondering the gilded palace of sin, why now take a moment and meet Pope Hormisdus, who also was the father of Pope Sylverius I, which is really quite something. The latter is alleged to have bought the papacy from King Theodehad of the Ostrogoths. With its customary discretion, the Catholic Encyclopedia says of this latter transaction:

The election of a subdeacon as Bishop of Rome was unusual. Consequently, it is easy to understand that, as the author of the first part of the life of Silverius in the "Liber pontificalis" (ed. Duchesne, I, 210) relates, a strong opposition to it appeared among the clergy. This, however, was suppressed by Theodatus so that, finally, after Silverius had been consecrated bishop (probably on 8 June, 536) all the Roman presbyters gave their consent in writing to his elevation. The assertion made by the author just mentioned that Silverius secured the intervention of Theodatus by payment of money is unwarranted, and is to be explained by the writer's hostile opinion of the pope and the Goths.

Dolan's right. It's spin control. Always has been, Both Hormisdus and Sylverius are saints, by the way, the Manning family of popes. The Holy Spirit, she works in mysterious ways, that one.